Humanizing the Business Deal

By Drew Sickler

ChatGPT is a newcomer in the tech space over the last year, but the impact has been nothing short of incredible.  

Organizations are rushing to adopt it, rethinking their approach to scaling their business personnel, and working to plug it in anywhere it might suit.  

In fact, McKinsey estimates that generative AI (GenAI) could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy.  

But what happens when the human element is minimized — or even removed altogether from business deals?  

I’ve worked for enterprise firms for the bulk of my career, primarily in the banking and wealth management space.  

Since joining Customertimes, I’ve had the opportunity to expand my footprint into other verticals, and a high level of customer care continues to be top of mind for both Customertimes and our clients.  

Retaining a customer is always less expensive than acquiring a new one, so regardless of industry, the goal is simple: build a lifetime relationship with your client, patient, or consumer.  

In an ideal scenario, your customers are pleased with your product and increase their investment in your firm year over year.  

So, what does this look like in today’s digitally transformed business landscape?  

Salesforce invests in GenAI

Institutions are continually finding new ways to leverage GenAI in their existing products & services. It’s no surprise that Salesforce is investing more into the space by way of acquisitions.  

With their release earlier this year of GPT across multiple clouds and Einstein 1 last week at Dreamforce, these new feature sets natively embedded within Salesforce will take current guided selling, support, and automation to a new level we’ve never seen before. 

Both products should help reduce human error and improve data quality; however, the question is: How can we leverage automated tools like these to help alleviate customer challenges without sounding like a machine? 

Prioritizing client well-being

On a holistic level, consumer expectations have leveled up. B2B customers expect you to understand their pain points (even before a first engagement at times).  

They expect you to demonstrate that you know their ideal customer profile and the growth potential for their industry. So, the question at hand still remains: How do we balance leveraging automation with LLM & AI without going to the extreme? 

Just like machine learning and GPT, we take it in stride. We make sure we can instill trust and confidence as we learn how these tools affect our work efforts, brand, and the overall well-being of our clients, and even society as a whole.  

Slowly but surely, we can continue to leverage the technology that’s built today without taking anything away from the relationships, and rapport that were built in the first place.  

The Customertimes approach

At Customertimes, one-on-one relationships are critical to our success, so when new technologies are introduced, we take the time to figure out how they can help our customers with their existing use cases, and we meet with them to share how these new tools can help them drive business growth.  

Since we have a strong rapport with our clients, they know we understand their current use case and their business goals, so we’re able to guide them to a new level of growth that’s supported by new technologies.  

The combination of human expertise and new technologies delivers a powerful boost to their long-term growth.